New Jersey Governor Chris Christie may be in hot water over who knew what when regarding the bridge lane closures on the George Washington Bridge last September, but it is the latest transportation-related maneuver by his administration that has people protesting from Fort Lee, NJ to Fremont, Calif.

“Since 2013, Tesla Motors has been working constructively with the New Jersey Motor Vehicle Commission (NJMVC) and members of Governor Christie’s administration to defend against the New Jersey Coalition of Automotive Retailers’ (NJ CAR) attacks on Tesla’s business model and the rights of New Jersey consumers. Until yesterday, we were under the impression that all parties were working in good faith,” Tesla wrote on its company blog.

Tesla’s approach to sell directly is critical, the company maintains, because it is selling a new technology. “This model is not just a matter of selling more cars and providing optimum consumer choice for Americans,” the blog states, “but it is also about educating consumers about the benefits of going electric, which is central to our mission to accelerate the shift to sustainable transportation, a new paradigm in automotive technology.”

New Jersey is not the first state to make it difficult for Tesla to operate outside the domain of traditional auto dealerships. A two-month effort to pass bills in the Texas legislature that would allow Tesla Motors to sell electric cars directly to consumers failed last summer after lawmakers failed to vote on the issue before adjourning.

The bills would have created an exemption to the current law that prohibits factory-owned dealerships. The two Tesla-backed bills did not even make it to the floor, which could mean a long wait before Tesla can try again in the Lone Star State, as the legislature will not meet again until 2015. In the meantime, Tesla has devised a complicated work-around in the state.

Tesla has fought and won in other states, with favorable court decisions in Massachusetts and New York, according to Automotive News. The EV upstart has also won a round of court battles in Minnesota.

Last year, a bill was introduced in North Carolina that would prevent Tesla from selling its luxury vehicles in the state. Instead of unleashing just lawyers, Tesla took its Model S to the state capitol, according to the Charlotte Observer. After Republican House Speaker Thomas Tillis took a spin in the car, his chamber never voted on the bill.

In New Jersey, Tesla won’t have a chance to take lawmakers in Trenton for a test drive to win hearts and minds. Instead of allowing the Proposal PRN 2013-138 to be taken up by the legislature, the Christie administration expedited the law via the NJMVC on Tuesday.

Tesla slammed the move on its blog, noting that the sudden move came after nine months of unexplained delays for a new sales license for Tesla. “This is an issue that affects not just Tesla customers,” Tesla writes, “but also New Jersey citizens at large, because Tesla would be unable to create new jobs or participate in New Jersey’s economic revival.”

The new ruling will require Tesla to use third-party dealerships, which all of the companies Tesla competes against use. The change will essentially mean that Tesla has to stop selling cars at its current dealerships in the state starting on April 1.

The effort by car dealerships to shut down Tesla could be just the first of many battles that the disruptive technology company faces as it expands beyond the domain of luxury vehicles. Its planned Giga factory will also likely bring more pushback from incumbent carmakers of all stripes, and maybe even traditional power generators, as the lower cost of energy storage could take more people off-grid.

For now, deep-pocketed New Jerseyans will have to head over to New York or Pennsylvania to score a coveted Model S. And not all dealerships in the Garden State are cheering the move by Christie to give Tesla the boot. At least one dealer is hoping that Tesla will want to start using dealerships, starting with his, according to this tweet:

@TeslaMotors I have a dealership in Edison,NJ - I would be interested in becoming a official #Tesla dealer

Katherine Tweed writes on smart grid, demand response, energy efficiency and home networking for Greentech Media. Her freelance work has appeared in a range of media outlets, from Scientific American and FoxNews to Audubon Magazine and Men’s Health. She has a master’s degree in Science, Health and Environmental Reporting from New York University. Katherine never leaves her electronics in ...

One major issue or question not addressed in this post is: “Why Tesla wants an exemption from a long standing New Jersey law that requires Independent Automobile Marketing Dealerships?” (A regulation established well before Christie entered office; and required for all other Automobile Manufacturers). The answer is possibly the fact Tesla currently receives about seven California ‘Zero Emission Vehicle Credit’ (ZEVC) for each EV it builds and apparently must directly sell to qualify for or keep ownership to the ZEVC revenues. Each ZEVC is currently valued at about $5,000 each, which means for each Tesla Model S built/sold creates about $35,000 in ZEVC revenues. Add to this the $7,500 Federal EV tax credit that yields about a total of $42,500 of Government influenced credits paid (directly and indirectly) to Tesla for each $80,000 Model S sold (or total subsides equivalent to over 50% of the total Model S retail cost).

Who pays for these subsidies? First, to comply with California’s Zero Emission Vehicle (ZEV) standards those Manufacturers who do not build and sell ZEV’s must purchase the ZEVC’s (largely from Tesla) in order to do business within California. And, of course, Tax Payers pay for the Federal EV tax credits.

Tesla has definitely been one of the most successful EV manufacturers in the U.S. It will be interesting to see if their Corporate 'business model' can be sustainable without the perpetual massive Government subsidies in the future.

Tesla doesn't want an exemption from any law. There is nothing in the law that requires a automobile manufacturer to have an independent dealership. This is why Tesla already had a dealership license and was selling cars in NJ just fine.

The auto dealer lobbies saw that a change in the law in the legislature was not possible so they bribed the MVC to use their executive powers to change the law without a vote. So Christie's MVC changed the law making it impossible for Tesla to renew their dealership license.

Also, I suggest you look up today's value of ZEVC credits. They have a value of pretty much 0$. Your data is over a year outdated.

And no, tax payes do not pay for the federal EV tax credits. The tax credits are in the form of non-refundable tax credits. Non-refundable tax credits means the person who bought the car can reduce the taxes owed but will not get any refund from the government, which means the cost to tax payers is 0$.

Katherine, last year Bill Wolters of the Texas Autmobile Dealers' Association made this comment:

"I tell people that franchised dealers have a greater presence in our state of any significant organization except the public school system...you don’t find major retailers or major businesses in these towns of less than 15,000 population and the reason they exist there is a lot of our citizens [with transportation needs] live there."

http://www.hybridcars.com/why-auto-dealer-associations-oppose-tesla/

Perhaps the presence of automobile dealers in Texas rivals the public school system not because of "transportation needs", but laws which prohibit any other arrangement.

I am at something at a loss as to why this car for millionaires and billionaires has become such a cause celebré.

Or maybe I’m not.

Although the car CULTure is not sustainable in any form, except maybe for the most privileged 10% or 15% of humanity, this percentage of humanity rules the world in an increasingly oblivious fashion.

This car has nothing to do with environmental sustainability, because, well, it's a car. Things that replace cars, or make them unavailable may have something to do with environmental sustainability, but realistically, the car CULTure is so sexy, so invested in humanity’s distorted vision of itself, that this realization can only come when it’s too late. In the meantime, the Tesla is doing nothing more than to promote the fantasy that the car, responsible for so much death and environmental destruction, remains as sexy as cigarettes used to be.

Egon Musk is not an environmental hero. He’s just another case of a person who has confused his wealth with wisdom and found a credulous, if continually outraged, subsection of the public to march along with his pied piper distraction. Ten years from now, old lithium batteries from this unfortunate distributed energy scheme will be leaching into water supplies and the world will merely be another ten years along in speeding to the environmental abyss about which we love to complain, and about which we love to do nothing.

If, in the meantime, we have 3000 millionaires tooling around here in New Jersey in their Tesla cars, it will make no difference to the quality of our air: If we had 30,000 of them it would make no difference. If we had 300,000 it would mean nothing but more fracking in this region, with all the intergenerational tragedy that practice involves.

The status of Tesla dealerships is not an environmental issue; it's a money issue, which is why, I guess, it can be made to seem so important. We live in a culture where money has replaced virtue as an end in itself.

Then there's science:

The laws of thermodynamics require that changes in forms of energy lose energy to heat. The energy conversions required to run a Tesla car are as follows: Chemical energy, generally, (natural gas, coal or oil) is converted to thermal energy, thermal energy is converted to mechanical energy, mechanical energy is converted to electrical energy, electrical energy is shipped and converted back into chemical energy, chemical energy is converted back into electrical energy and finally into mechanical energy.

This process is a thermodynamic, and thus an environmental, nightmare, particularly with the use of dangerous fossil fuels.

Of course, Musk's advertisements like to pretend that the source of energy is the absurdly expensive and widely failed so called "renewable energy" industry, but as of 2014, this industry remains what it has always been, a wishful thinking fantasy that does very little more than to redistribute wealth to the rich at the expense of the poor.

You realize that form of purism is what will in the end do more harm then anything else? Yes, in the end run having a Tesla is not as good as taking say a train when considering the environment. But it is better then having a gasoline vehicle.

Of course it is important to promote what is best but it is also important to be realistic and applaud steps in the right direction even if they are small steps. Even if a person buys a higher mpg gasoline car, that should be aplauded as well. Purism only turns people off and screws everyone.

Also, most automtoive batteries are recycled and even if some of them do somehow end up in the water supply, it is not that big of a deal. Lithium Ion is non-toxic. There has been plenty of talks of adding lithium to our water supplies as it has been found places with lithium concentrations in water reduces suicide rates.

Tesla owners are not all millionaires and Tesla plans to make a Model E which will cost 35k. In NJ most of the power comes from nuclear, not NG. And Tesla superchargers will be 100% solar powered.

Very few places us oil for electricity, coal usage is dropping and most places that buy EVs use little coal. NJ I don't think uses coal at all.(If they do it is less than 3%). And new NG plants run at over 60% efficiency.

Tesla doesn't have advertisements. But if you are talking about on their website. They advertise no such thing. They offer you a map where you can see where your electricity comes from in your state.

N Nadir, if we operate under the assumption that in most non-urban areas American car culture is here to stay, wouldn't a combination of affordable, long-range EVs powered by nuclear energy do more than anything to lower our transportation-related carbon emissions? Although manufacturing cars in itself generates carbon, they last a long time, use fewer parts, and require less maintenance.

Your comment seems to be more of a class statement against Tesla and the people who buy them than against the technology, which is by most accounts remarkable. Musk didn't set out to price the American public out of buying his cars; the technology did that for him. To survive in a cutthroat industry which was sitting on its hands with respect to EVs he had to appeal to a blue-blooded market, and he's done a pretty amazing job at it.

I have no doubt that in coming years Tesla will be a leader in lower-priced electric vehicles for the rest of us.

The thermodynamic argument made in my post applies equally as well to nuclear energy as it does to dangerous fossil fuels. An electric car wastes energy in an irresponsible way.

Now, granted, an electric car would be marginally more responsible if all the world's electricity were produced by nuclear power, but that is not the case, and will not be the case, since the world is not run by rationality.

The reality is that dangerous fossil fuels will be supplying the bulk of the world's electricity for a long time to come, particularly because of the fossil fuel industry's amazingly successful "bait and switch" marketing campaign in which it continuously hypes up the so called "renewable energy" fig leaf to secure its own future indefinitely, until the last carbon atom is ripped out of the earth and burned.

The Tesla company is particularly obscene in pushing this game; their ads offend me almost as much as those Jeep ads one sees with SUV's four wheeling around pristine forests, driving over river beds, screaming up unpaved ancient geological formations. To me a desert is far more beautiful without thousands of greasy metal whirlygigs stuck in it, or huge layers of dusty glass coated with cadmium telluride spread over thousands of hectares. Yet many of their ads that have passed before my eyes - they're excellent emetics - the Tesla car company features exactly this kind of obscenity.

Thus there is no good reason to praise this Tesla "innovation" - which is really not all that innovative in any case - and far less reason to subsidize it massively.

I think that many people would assume that one who strongly supports nuclear energy as I do would applaud this car, because most people associate nuclear energy with electricity. There has always been a rather silly "criticism" of nuclear energy that it doesn't do much about replacing gasoline.

There are probably many reasons to keep some kinds of self powered vehicles around for some purposes, particularly in agriculture, as well for mass transit vehicles like buses, trains traveling through areas where energy transmission is impossible, emergency vehicles, maybe some local delivery vehicles, etc.

I would question whether electrical powered vehicles are the best options.

We live potentially, if we don't screw up too badly, at the dawn of the golden age of materials science, where engineered chemically resistant refractories are already doing amazing things on an industrial scale. In a rational world, this would mean that very high temperature nuclear reactors are very practical. Such reactors make possible human entry into the carbon cycle in which the energy transitions for self powered vehicles would be as follows: Nuclear energy to thermal energy to chemical energy to thermal energy to mechanical energy. This is 5 energy form transitions as opposed to the eleven I listed in my previous post.

But there is a subtle distinction. The very high temperature devices I envision are also extremely efficient devices that have elements of the combined cycle schemes used in dangerous fossil fuel plants now operating, i.e. they are kinds of where heat has to extract considerably exergy before disappearing into entropy, and I conceive of them as having certain types of chemical cascades connected with the much discussed "chemical looping" technology that has been all over the scientific and engineering journals in recent years, technologies for separating oxygen from other gas streams, including but not limited to air, with electricity as a possible side product. It is thus possible to imagine the first step in this process as having higher energy efficiency, higher exergy, than the best combined cycle dangerous natural gas plants, which is something like 60%.

In the eleven step conversion I described for electric cars in my earlier post, the thermal efficiency of most of the dangerous fossil fuel plants are more like 35% or less, as is the case with modern types of nuclear plants. The efficiency of the electrical to chemical and back to electrical is also troublesome. I note that the energy/mass density efficiency is also extremely low for the entire system.

Now you might correctly note that my claims are speculative and fanciful, but they are no more fanciful than the stuff put out by companies like Tesla.

I noted elsewhere on the internet that electric cars in China - where there are more than 100 million electric vehicles, many of them scooters - actually have a worse health impact there than gasoline cars. In that writing I cited this paper:

My support for nuclear energy does not arise purely from the beauty of the technology, beautiful though it may be: I'm a geek, but not a pure geek. My support for nuclear energy is rather very much connected with my environmentalism and my humanism.

For the record, therefore, I am not ashamed to use the rhetoric of "class warfare." The people who complain the loudest about said "warfare" are the precisely the people who are the most brutal in its application and who are, in fact, winning in this warfare. There are more than two billion people on this planet who have never seen or operated a toilet bowl; a similar number have no access to electricity. These are not the winners in the on going redistribution of wealth as a result of the, um "warfare."

The Tesla car has nothing to do with the reality of the losers in "class warfare;" it's a distraction from the appreciation of their dire tragedies. And thus I want to have as little participation in this scheme of rote praise for this boondoggle as is humanly possible.

I'm sympathetic with your feelings about the environment and the mess our present culture is making of it, but I feel very differently about Elon Musk and Tesla.

The type of world that you and I would both like to see requires advanced battery technology. In that world, they may be used to power electric bikes rather than luxury sedans, but there will still be a need for clean mobile power. Something cheaper and a lot more durable than anything we currently have would help a lot. But developments like that don't just spring into existence fully fledged.

What Musk has done with Tesla is to use existing technology in a way that creates a market. It establishes conditions in which make the development of better batteries possible. Perhaps even inevitable. And a world without Briggs and Stratton would be, IMHO, a better world than this. ;-)

N Nadir, I have respect for your knowledge and insight, and I no less than anyone would like to see civilization defy consumption, convenience, and vanity in the name of humanity. Where we differ is the best road to get there. I see the Tesla Model S as an essential step between the Hummer and a compact electric car, or electric buses - not as a goal. And if millionaires feel good about creating less carbon, that's ok with me.

I don't completely follow your discussion of chemical looping and cascading energy reactions, but it's intriguing. In the interest of shortening energy chains I once calculated that using a 1-inch cube of Polonium-210 in a radioisotope thermoelectric generator one could power a minivan for about 10 months. No fillups, no exhaust (just the messy problem of a spy agency cracking into the P210 and poisoning someone's soup with it).

Just HOW can Tesla's "many ads" OFFEND you, when Tesla hasn't spent ONE RED CENT on advertising, EVER?! They have a $0 advertising budget, and don't need to advertise at all because every single car they make is already pre-sold before it comes off the assembly line!! By the way, how's that TSLA short working out for you?

I always get these kinds of emotional responses when I question this "green car" fantasy, particularly about the great God of the holy Tesla car.

This ad at this link offends me very much: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QweNsLesMrM

I have no idea if Tesla, whose logo is all over the not-an-ad ad, paid a red cent for this, or whether it was funded by a devotional bunch of acolytes. It exists, and it's obscenely called "a gallon of light"

Why does it offend me? It offends me because I know very, very, very, very, very well whence electricity comes. I know how much energy, in joules is in a gallon of gasoline, the capacity utilization of solar cells, what solar cells are made of and how they are made, and I'm very aware of the situation with electricity in the state in which I live, which is New Jersey. I have spent years studying the thermodynamics of energy production, transfer and use. For the record, I oppose the solar industry, as it is not sustainable.

I know for instance, that it's very unlikely that all the solar cells they put on their "charging stations" are unlikely to produce enough electricity in a year to provide 10 full charges for a car, if that.

I personally couldn't care less about Tesla dealerships or Tesla cars in New Jersey. I've lived here for more than 20 years, and I've seen exactly two Tesla cars in all that time, both times in wealthy neighborhoods, including my own.

They are irrelevant and I have little doubt that more oil, gas and coal has been burned defending this affectation than has been saved by the existence of every Tesla car that has ever been manufactured.

I have no problem with people building and buying electric cars on their own dime. However I oppose special laws for them, tax breaks for them, and subsidies for them, since there are infinitely more important things to be addressed than this toy involves.

Gallons of Light, the commercial you linked was made by FANS of Tesla, not Tesla themselves. It was produced by the fans with no funding, they did it themselves.

Though by the sound of things you know very little about solar power. Even a house installation of 7.5kw size is more than enough to provide 9000kwh (In a place like california they can get 11000kwh in a year). 9000kwh is more than enough to provide over 100 full charges.

You are making a very fatal mistake of using gasoline as a starting point, the gas engine is EXTREMELY inefficient compared to an AC induction motor plus lithium ion battery. Based on EPA ratings the Tesla Model S consumes 320watts per mile. A gasoline car consumes north of 1000watts per mile due to inefficiency.

Though to note, Tesla's sister company is SolarCity, since the commercial was done in California. Most of the power they got was probably from solar. (on-site and off-site)

As far as subsidy goes though, everything is subsidized so I don't see where you are getting.

You do realize that the laws in NJ allow Tesla to sell their cars directly right? This is why Tesla already has a dealership license and selling cars. What Tesla is complaining about is that the MVC changed the laws on them without a vote bypassing the legislature.

Paul, electric vehicles' relevance to the environment is confirmed by the GREET model (well-to-wheels emissions analysis of Argonne National Laboratory) and three acts of Congress, which offer a $7,500 tax credit on the purchase of all EVs including Teslas. States also offer credits, Colorado the highest with $6,000. If you're not familiar with GREET I urge you to download it (it's available as an Excel spreadsheet) and run some models yourself. The average carbon savings for electric vehicles are significant.

I don't believe anyone would dispute that the Tesla Model S is a luxury vehicle, but Musk should therefore comply with existing state law? Again, maybe this case should be judged on some less trivial metric than class warfare. I certainly can't afford one, but there's no doubt that Tesla has broken ground - not only in being the first modern, commercially-available electric car, but with innovative technology.

The bloated, sclerotic U.S. automotive establishment, dying a slow death after thirty years of being innovation-free, would like very much for this six-year-old upstart and their Motor Trend Car of the Year to go away. Maintaining status quo, and a lousy one at that - that's the purpose of these regressive, industry-specific laws which are probably unconstitutional but have grown enough roots into some states' economies to be accepted without question.

Yep, I am not up on GREET, however....I think my point stands regarding The Tesla.

The Gov't may give away $7500 in Tax credit all they want, BUT if you count all the Teslas sold and tally up their contribution toward overall CO2 reduction, factoring in the CO2 present in the source of the electric power used to charge the Teslas, it is hard to not think of The Teslas as irrelevant, as far as their contributions.

I am not saying or trying to say that electric vehicles per se are, or will always be irrelevant.